Conducting an interview is a process by which an interviewer provides a plurality of questions to a respondent, and the respondent provides answers to the questions. An interview includes a plurality of questions and may also include additional features, such as explanatory information for clarifying the questions and/or instructions on how to provide the answers to the interviewer.
Typically, the answers from several respondents are compiled and utilized for any of a number of purposes, such as marketing research studies, consumer profiles, consumer satisfaction, advertising effectiveness, consumer preferences, market price sensitivity, consumer profiles, brand name recognition, concept testing, volume forecasting, employee satisfaction and problem detection. However, the answers from respondents should ideally be checked for errors and illogical information. In addition, ideally only the answers from "qualified" respondents are compiled and utilized. For example, if certain questions are directed to a respondent's experience with a product, only respondents who have used the product would be considered qualified respondents.
The process of preventing unqualified respondents from answering prescribed questions is known as "moderation". In general, there are three ways to conduct an interview in which respondents are moderated: (i) moderation by the respondent, (ii) moderation by the interviewer, and (iii) moderation by a computer or other computing device.
Moderation by the respondent is typically performed by providing the respondent with instructions which accompany the questions of the interview. For example, one instruction might be the text "If you answered YES to the last question, please skip to question 9". Moderation by the respondent is typically accomplished with self-administered questionnaires, which may be sent to the respondent by mail, facsimile transmission or electronic mail transmission. Moderation by the respondent is not preferable, and is the least reliable method of moderation because a respondent may inadvertently or deliberately fail to follow the instructions.
Moderation by the interviewer is typically performed by providing the interviewer with instructions and the questions of the interview. Moderation by the interviewer is typically accomplished with face-to-face interviews and telephone surveys (with or without computer assistance). This method of moderation is likewise not preferable because the interviewer may ask leading questions or have biased opinions which affect the respondent's answers.
Moderation by a computer or similar computing device does not suffer from the above-described drawbacks of moderation by a human respondent or interviewer. Moderation by a computer may be accomplished by providing a computer programmed to conduct an interview at a booth, cubicle, kiosk or similar location accessible to the public. Answers received by each computer at each location are stored and later collected and compiled. However, requiring respondents to physically travel to computer locations is less desirable than allowing respondents to answer from more convenient locations such as their homes. Furthermore, collecting and compiling answers from a number of locations is time consuming and thus is undesirable.
Moderation by a computer may also be accomplished by providing respondents with a disk storing software which, when run on a computer, conducts an interview. The respondent's answers are stored on the disk. After the interview, each respondent returns his disk and the answers on the disks are compiled. This method of accomplishing moderation by a computer suffers from the need to collect and compile answers from a number of returned disks, and requires respondents to have the appropriate computer hardware and operating system to run the software stored on the disk.
A large and growing number of people have access to the Internet, a global computer network. It would be ideal to conduct an interview between respondent computers, located in respondents' homes and connected to the Internet, and a server computer which is connected to the Internet, and which collects and compiles the answers from the respondent computers. Answers from respondent computers would be more easily collected and compiled.
A large number of computers connected to the Internet communicate using Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), and these computers are HTTP clients and/or HTTP servers. Unfortunately, HTTP clients and HTTP servers exist in a "stateless" ("connectionless") relationship in which an HTTP client and an HTTP server do not continually exchange information unless a transfer from one to the other is in progress. This tends to limit the interaction between the HTTP client and the HTTP server to requests for and delivery of predetermined files. An explanation of the Internet and HTTP in particular may be found in RFC 1945, "Hypertext Transfer Protocol--HTTP/1.0", by T. Berners-Lee, R. Fielding and H. Frystyk, May 1996, and "The Mac Web Server Book", by Mark R. Bell and Rob Terrell, 1996, Ventana Communications Group, Inc., in particular pages 24-25, both of which are incorporated herein by reference as part of the present disclosure.
Because of the stateless relationship described above, an interview which includes moderation may not be easily performed over the Internet. In fact, it is generally believed that surveys and similar complex interviews cannot be successfully conducted over the Internet. Since there is no "memory" of what information has passed across the Internet between a server computer and a respondent computer, the server computer cannot easily determine which respondent has provided the answers received by the server computer.
Furthermore, if an interview between a server computer and a respondent computer were to be conducted over the Internet, the server computer could not easily determine which questions correspond to the received answers from the respondent computer. For example, the software used by HTTP clients for communicating with an HTTP server is known as a "web browser". Examples of web browsers include Netscape Navigator.TM., NCSA Mosaic.TM. and Microsoft Internet Explorer.TM.. Web browsers typically provide the ability to review previous transmission from an HTTP server. For example, by actuating a graphical "Back button " defined by the web browser, previous questions may be retrieved. Thus, previous questions may be re-answered by the respondent, which can affect the selection and sequence of questions prescribed by the server software. If the server computer has transmitted second, third or subsequent questions to the respondent computer, and the respondent computer transmits answers to the server computer, the server cannot easily determine whether the transmitted answers are in response to the previous question sent by the server computer, or in response to earlier questions.
Accordingly, it is an object of the present invention to provide a method and apparatus for conducting an interview between a server computer and a respondent computer.